The present application relates to software and more specifically to user interface designs and methods for facilitating manipulating information visualizations, such as tables, charts, graphs, tree diagrams, and so on.
A visualization may be any visual depiction or graphical arrangement of data and/or calculations based on data. Visualizations that include calculation results or measurements are called analytics herein. Visualizations are employed in various demanding applications, including business, science, and economics, for facilitating analyzing data and accompanying calculations to perform financial analysis, scientific inquiry, market forecasts, and so on. Such applications demand efficient mechanisms for enabling users to manipulate visualizations without losing focus on the visualization or analysis being performed.
Efficient mechanisms for manipulating visualizations are particularly important in analytic software employed by enterprises, where effective analysis of data can affect corporate profitability, goal attainment, and so on. Such analytic software may use data from business operations to enhance awareness and improve decision making. Organizations that successfully leverage their data assets for decision-making may gain a competitive advantage.
Conventionally, analytics software used to present visualizations employs various menu items, buttons, and other Graphical User Interface (GUI) controls to facilitate selecting underlying data, performing calculations or operations on underlying data, and for manipulating visualizations. Example visualization manipulations include pivoting, zooming, filtering of data, drilling into data (i.e., illustrating more detail), adding or removing dimensions and measures from a visualization, and so on. However, use of separate menus, buttons, and so on, may distract a user from the analytic, which may complicate analysis.
Alternatively, certain mechanisms for manipulating visualizations are embedded in the visualization itself. However, such mechanisms remain relatively inefficient and incomplete, and they may still require users to navigate complicated menus to select desired options. Such inefficiencies may further inhibit adoption of analytic software among enterprises.